o fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.

I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who
ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
activities of a hen farm.

If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day
and all day long. But one can't "encourage" quicksilver; because
the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. No, I am
saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal
aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become
able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
fact that it is a pension.

He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
it.

Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. The
success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other
autobiographical material, and he remembered those days along the
river-front in Hannibal--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen
boys, John Briggs, and the rest. He had recognized these things as
material--inviting material it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry
Farm he set himself to spin the fabric of youth.

He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and
on a hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him
that spring a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a
pilot-house--overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city
below. Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and
embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of
his new retreat, Clemens wrote:

It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a peaked
roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is
a cozy nest and just ro